How To Get From CRM To Social

Your company's all over Facebook and Twitter, but until IT integrates marketing and customer service systems, it's all just show.

Check the stats: 845 million people have signed up for Facebook worldwide, 152 million of them in the U.S.--nearly half the U.S. population. No wonder consumer-oriented businesses are obsessed with how to get more out of social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

For business technology organizations, the challenge is figuring out the intersection between social and everything under the customer relationship management sun. CRM broadly covers the software systems companies use to serve customers, generate sales leads, manage marketing campaigns, and analyze and segment customer data. Making the connection between the people in CRM databases and their social media personas will require companies to build a new level of trust with their customers, based on the promise of better service and value. This social connection is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of customers and making more cost-effective use of sales, service, marketing, and IT resources.

Marketing, sales, and customer service execs often start experimenting in the social sphere without IT's help. But companies eventually need to link these efforts to on-premises CRM and marketing campaign management systems and customer data warehouses. IT groups also bring experience in data security and compliance with privacy polices and regulations. And IT can bring a much-needed process rigor: Just 17% of companies polled in our 2012 Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey have a formal process for responding to customer complaints on Facebook, despite two-thirds having a Facebook presence.

Startups Get It

Plenty of well-established companies are just beginning to embrace social: Only 19% of companies have had an external presence on Facebook for more than two years, our survey finds. So there's much to learn from Internet startups such as Adaptu that are born with the assumption of social-savvy service, sales, and marketing.

Adaptu, an online personal financial management and planning service started in 2010, aggregates data from customer financial accounts--banking, investments, mortgage, credit cards, car loans--and delivers budget and financial planning assessments and advice. An Adaptu mobile app includes a "Can I Afford This?" feature that lets people type in a would-be transaction and see how big of a hole it would blow in their budgets.

The service is built largely on Salesforce.com and the Force.com development platform. The customer sees Adaptu branding, but it's Salesforce's online software that handles logins, identity management, and customer service case tracking. For customer service, Adaptu uses Get Satisfaction to provide online self-help services; a customer can also submit a request for help on the site, which starts a case within Salesforce CRM.

But companies can't count on customers diligently exhausting self-service support options before they raise a stink on social networks. So Adaptu uses Radian6 social media monitoring capabilities to capture brand-relevant posts, tweets, and Facebook comments. Radian6 (which Salesforce acquired last year) lists every comment about Adaptu and provides an interface through which company reps can respond to comments directly on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever the message originated.

Adaptu tries to respond in public but resolve in private, tweeting that the customer should email a support question. "If somebody tweets something like 'I can't get my bank to link up,' we want to stop that conversation from happening publicly because it will potentially involve private financial information," says Jenna Forstrom, Adaptu's community manager. If the customer does send an email, it creates a Salesforce case.

But Adaptu tries to keep that CRM case connected to the social persona where it began. Agents ask customers to include their Twitter handle or Facebook name, so the support team knows that the original request came in through social media, and so two case teams aren't chasing the same problem. And once the matter's resolved, Adaptu posts a comment back to the original tweet or Facebook post.

Connecting Facebook and Twitter identities with known customers in your CRM database is important on several levels. From a service perspective, you'll see not just the latest support problem raised in a social comment, but the entire history of support exchanges with that customer. From a sales and marketing perspective, you can correlate social profile information with purchase histories and know more about key customer segments' likes and interests. And with the use of sentiment analysis technologies, you can get trending insight into what the most important customers are saying about your brand, products, and competitors.

The linchpin is that it has to be up to consumers to add their social identities to their profiles. However, as many marketers can attest, offers of discounts and coupons, early product news, sweepstakes entries, or better service often persuade people to grant permission.

I read your CRM to Social article several times in fact to fully understand all the aspects of social, CRM, big data, marketing and IT and while I agree on almost everything you have written, I have to disagree on marketing integrating their social solutions with CRM in IT. I have worked as an IT Management consultant in the past for Gartner, Inc and am now working on my own, however never have I seen the marketing people more frustrated with IT then I have in the past several months. As we know most IT stops are run in maintenance mode for 70-90% of their day to day operations and that only leaves about 10-13% of their time available for implementing new solutions and this is where the problem begins.

The marketing teams are being told by their IT teams that on average it will take 3-6 months for them to be able to integrated their social solutions and other online marketing systems into the corporate CRM solution. Most of the marketing teams I have been working with have basically stated that they can't wait that long and want another alternative, one that they can implement faster and one where they have control over its roll-out and implementation. Whether this is good news or not, marketing now has an option they didn't have a few year ago, they can now go to the cloud and get it done in a 3-6 week timeframe, and completely bypass their IT team. While the CRM solution doesn't fully integrate with corporates CRM solution initially, marketing is able to move forward and meet the demands of its business customers. As an aside their is also leading the marketing people to hire IT people to help out with these type implementations.

While I completely respect the fact that you feel IT should be driving this, the truth is that IT has had a poor track record of meeting the business needs and as a result business unit are now moving their IT needs out to the cloud to circumvent IT vs having to put up with delays and processes, etc. I think IT needs rethink how it supports the business and especially the marketing department these days as I am seeing a trend from the business side to move more of their IT operations to the cloud vs having to deal with their internal IT teams.

Keep up the great work

Tim PacileoIT Visionary and Advisor to C-Level ExecutivesProven Business and IT Problem Solver and Turn-Around Specialistwww.theboardroomadvisors.comAhead Of The Curve Advisory Services

The article mentions two interesting things: More established firms are lagging behind in terms of adoption, and Adaptu is doing it right. Most established organizations are governed by the over 15,000 regulations in North America that apply to electronic communications. Social media is the new frontier for many and figuring out how to navigate those regulations along with complex eDiscovery requirements and internal privacy policies. Financial services is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, and all over the globe our organization (Actiance) is taking part in discussions with companies trying to move to social in a safe and compliant way. In the course of two weeks we've spoken on Wall Street, in the UK financial services district and today at the SCCE Energy and Compliance conference in Texas. Companies that are lagging behind are doing so for some very daunting reasons.

Adaptu and other start-ups are probably also governed by many electronics communications compliance requirements, privacy requirements and other mandates but none as strict as those that govern Fortune 500 companies or Pharma, finserv, government, healthcare, Energy and others.

The trends we see on a weekly basis are that large organizations know that they need to make a change and are working to do so, but the red tape doesn't make it easy for them or their employees.

Good article, Doug. And, thanks for your coverage of Attensity as Whirlpool's customer experience management and sentiment analytics application. The next time you're in town, weG«÷d love to have you come visit AttensityG«÷s Palo Alto headquarters to see the new Voice of the Customer (VoC) Command Center, their prototype of a G«£mission controlG«• for large companies looking to monitor AND manage customer conversations from both internal and social web sources, in real time.

@Tim,You are speaking of demands from marketing for results in weeks, not months. I would first challenge marketing. If they have an actual marketing plan with targeted campaigns, and well thought thru strategies by demographic, aligned with the company's annual operating plan, then IT should have some runway to deliver the desired integration. My experience from the inside is usually when marketing is demanding delivery of items in weeks, they are thowing stuff out there to see what sticks with no real planning to back it up or they are just wanting to implement technology to say they have done it (keeping up with the Joneses).

Second point is that you can only do the integration thru the cloud if the company's other systems are on the cloud. If the core CRM and ERP systems are on premise, as they are at most large companies, bypassing IT thru the cloud is just not in keeping with the facts

Third point is that real business integration, that is, integration of process AND technology takes time to design and build and, often times, the process component takes substantially more time than the technology. Building integration in 3 to 6 weeks assumes automating an existing well designed process with a very narrow scope, which rarely exists in the social media space. The broader business integration that provides REAL value takes more time to work thru and deliver.

So while IT does need to become more adept at quick delivery, the business functions need to change their mode of operation as well. The business functions need to justify what they want with a business case (no technology for hype or to see what sticks) and they need to be prepared to articluate a well thought out process if they want quick IT solutions. It's a 2 way street, but instead every article just focuses on IT.

Doug, great article. I feel that the intriguing part of integrating social media channels into "applications" is that you are reaching a tremendous audience within a "venue" that they are already comfortable and familiar with. They are more likely to "Like" and Tweet simply because it does not take too much time and its easy. How else can you get your point across in 140 characters or with a simple click of a mouse? :-) The data stored within these "social graphs" can provide its owners with critical metrics around their content. By analyzing trends within user growth and demographics as well as consumption and creation of content...owners and developers are better equipped to improve their business.

I also must admit, that this data can be unlocked in a number of ways- thanks to the publicly available social APIs. I have worked with both Twitter and FB APIs and they are extremely easy. This opens the doors for other lower cost data integration and business discovery solutions to grab a piece of this pie. In others words, if you have the right people with the right know how, you don't have to solely rely on an expensive BI vendor such as Microstrategy for this integration.

With this knowledge at hand, it should reduce the "fear" barrier that plagues most of the larger organizations. Most of them may not approach Social Media integration, because they simply refuse to change or "think" it is too expensive and will want to continue with "business as usual."

I have created applications using expressor Data Integration, QlikView and even some open source solutions that can achieve similar results like Microstrategy ... at a cost that is not even close.

One application extracts "marketing like campaign" and promotion information on a daily and weekly basis from Salesforce and posts it to the FB wall of "those" who "Like" the customer. The other application extracts FBInsights data, normalizes it and produces results in a QlikView Dashboard. Completely automated, robust solutions that provide information about the social graph when "they' need it.

Also note that these newer integration approaches do not always require IT involvement, as they are becoming more intuitive and provide more functionality that less technical staff can approach and understand.

I like to support my statements so I even provided a sample prototype on how one would leverage this type of integration with the FREE community version of expressor Data Integration software.

That is quite an insightful article. I believe that personalization and social CRM are the two of the most important trends for 2014. I have been doing some research for cloud apps for CRM and found a few with amazing features. One of those happens to be Banckle.CRM which is quite a useful app. You can check out more about new customer support trends for CRM vendors and this particular app.

The DevOps movement brings application development and infrastructure operations together to increase efficiency and deploy applications more quickly. But embracing DevOps means making significant cultural, organizational, and technological changes. This research report will examine how and why IT organizations are adopting DevOps methodologies, the effects on their staff and processes, and the tools they are utilizing for the best results.

Chances are your organization is adopting cloud computing in one way or another -- or in multiple ways. Understanding the skills you need and how cloud affects IT operations and networking will help you adapt.